New site
Hello! I've spent the last couple weeks cleaning up this site to use my new program, Lilac. I will open source Lilac in the coming days, and write about it more then because it deserves its own blog post.
1 Motivation
I used to use Hakyll for this blog (all of the pre-2026 posts were generated by Hakyll). But because Hakyll is a library (not an executable!), maintaining it was a chore. You have to have your own Cabal file and build your own unique Hakyll binary and then run that to generate the blog. While I didn't mind this too much at first when I was first learning Haskell, I've come to realize that needing to use a library is a design flaw. It's just too much work.
It's been a few years since I started looking for something better than Hakyll. In that time I've written Lilac, and so, I used it to update this site.
2 From GitHub to SourceHut
This site is hosted on SourceHut. Why the move away from GitHub pages? There are a few reasons:
For new contributions, I want to use SourceHut's development model of sending patches over email.
Somewhat similar to the above, I don't like GitHub's PR model, which is quite limited in terms of commit-by-commit reviews (Gerrit does this well).
I don't want to have a separate Git repo which has the deployed site content in its history. SourceHut's model lets you just push a tarball (nothing is committed), and I like this flexibility.
3 Future plans
Now that my blog's tech stack has been simplified, I plan to write more frequently. It will probably be mostly about tech as usual.
That's it for now!